Contested Boundaries
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INTRODUCTION I IN JUNE 1769, Mary Cooper visited the Quaker meeting in Oys- ter Bay, Long Island "where a multitude were geathered to here a woman preach that lately came from England." Four days later she noted the presence of "One Indan [sic] preacher" in the town. One August Sabbath "some Indans and one Black man came from Montalk" and preached all day. The next week Mary went to "New Light meeten to here a Black man preach." Two days later she and fellow travellers to New England encountered a man whose diatribes against "Mr. Whitefield," the famous English itinerant, proved "as much and something mor than we coula well beare to." In late November she again found herself "hurreing to meeten" to hear two Indian preachers who had just arrived in town. They remained for more than a week, holding "very happy meetens" in various places as "greate numbers flocked to here them." 1 Cooper punctuated her private reflections with reports of visit- ing preachers from distant places; black and red as well as white, Quaker as well as Baptist and Congregational, female as well as male. Most were "well received" by the people of Cooper's commu- nity, and their preaching often left the townspeople's souls "much affected." Cooper and her neighbors were ready to attend any of four different Oyster Bay meetinghouses and a number of private dwellings any time a visiting preacher passed through. She never re- corded a firsthand encounter with the preaching of George White- field, yet like evangelical Anglo-Americans everywhere she held the "grand itinerant" in high esteem. The passage of itinerants through Mary Cooper's life suggests how eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans employed religious cate-